


The Blue Water

by Neffectual



Category: Free!
Genre: M/M, Swimming, Swimming Pools
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 15:17:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3733660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neffectual/pseuds/Neffectual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Makoto likes to watch Haru's early morning practices, when it's just the two of them at the pool, with no distractions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blue Water

**Author's Note:**

> “When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water”   
> ― Gwendolyn Brooks
> 
>  
> 
> I should point out that I teach swimming for a living, and have done for a decade, so only started watching Free to critique animated technique.

Watching Haru cut through the water like he had been perfectly engineered to do so was Makoto’s guilty pleasure of a Saturday morning. It was worth getting up early in order to watch him, near-perfect form sweeping through the water with nary a splash to mark his presence. The pool was empty aside from Haruka’s wake, and the echoes only served to highlight the vaulted roof, the way the room acted as an echo chamber, the slap of water on walls loud where usually it was hidden under the sound of bodies moving and idle chatter. Normally the pool acted as an amplifier for the sounds its inhabitants were making, but when only Haru was in the pool, it seemed like the silence was what carried, rather than the sound. The cool blue of the water just served to make Haru’s skin pastel colours, the reflection of the lights marbling pale skin with patches of bright white, refracted in tiny ripples across Haru’s back, making his image distorted. 

Makoto arrives earlier than the scheduled practice begins, knowing that he could usually find Haruka warming up an hour before practice started. They aren’t supposed to be there without a lifeguard or a coach, but Makoto took his lifeguard exam a year ago, so figured he could spot for Haru, just in case. The black haired boy was constantly defending his ability to swim alone, but as Makoto always pointed out, it had nothing to do with skill or ability, and everything to do with chance and circumstance. Haru might think that water posed no dangers to him, but Makoto had seen the training videos they show new lifeguards, and wasn’t about to leave anything to chance. He had struggled to press hard enough on the chest of the dummy for his resuscitation test; a big guy, he was so used to being gentle with people that to press as hard as he needed to had meant unlearning all those years of turning back slaps into gentle touches, guaranteed not to bruise. 

Haru’s insistence to only swim freestyle, front crawl, had been the subject of numerous comments throughout the years, but only Makoto, who had learnt to swim alongside the aloof boy, knew the true reason why the Haru stuck to that stroke in particular. Firstly, his kick was naturally good, his toes pointing and knees unbent but still flexible, which would have put him in good stead for front or back crawl. However, unbeknownst to most, Haruka had always hated water in his ears, which was a problem common to those who swam backstroke. Even as a child, he had held his shoulders tense, with his chin stuck forwards, keeping the back of his head from the water, and if he had to put his head back, he would yank his hat down over his ears, shaking his head with a pout, before succumbing to the correct body position. Keeping his head up had meant he had struggle to float on his back for a long time, unable to create enough buoyancy to keep his feet from pulling him down, which had made Haru hate the stroke for a long time. Even when he had got to the stage where he could swim it properly, he still held himself stiffly, keeping his ears slightly higher than they should have been, and it slowed his stroke down far too much to be any use competitively.

Breast stroke had taken the slim boy a long time to learn, as well, because a natural crawl swimmer will always struggle to get their feet into the right position for the leg kick, and Haru had spent hours in the pool, a gnarled and bitten float under each arm, muttering ‘frog, star, pencil’ to himself, over and over. He had a screw kick for years, one leg perfect, the other curving, trying to keep to a crawl kick as much as possible, foot unable to turn out until, aged twelve, he had sat down on land and practiced over and over – on floors, in front of mirrors, on poolside – until one day, it clicked, and his kick was correct. As for butterfly, Haru had never had the strength of kick to move fluidly, nor the chest strength to use the arm swing correctly. The keyhole shape underwater had escaped him completely for the first year or so, and he had given it up as a bad idea around the time Rin had got good at it, content to fight the redhead on only one stroke, rather than two.

Watching Haru glide through the water is a culmination of all these things; from the first moment Makoto saw him in the water to the easy movements now, the broader boy can see every minute in between, the way the stroke has progressed, the way Haru has grown taller, broader, his shoulders muscled, his stomach lean and taut, not a spare inch anywhere on him. Whatever Haru sets his heart to, he does perfectly; he throws his heart and soul into things that he loves with an almost obsessive drive, and not for the first time, Makoto wonders what it would be like to have all of that attention focused on him for once. Haru loves the water – not in the way that there are locker room jokes about, suggestions that the pool drainage system has a lot to handle after one of his solo practice session, but really, truly loves water. 

Makoto suspects it has something to do with the year Haru had a growth spurt, and all of a sudden found that his limbs were too long, ungainly, that he caught his body on doors and corners and bumped other people because he was so unsure as to how long his legs really were. He never had the sustained growth that Makoto had found; just one swift burst of Haru growing like a weed, and that was that. Water, until then a treasured friend, a fun hobby, a way to feel at peace, had become his sanctuary. Underwater, his swim slid against the surface rather than bumping it, his longer reach served him better in getting to the edge of the pool; his longer limbs suddenly gave more propulsion. Makoto had found himself in that awkward stage all boys get, where the muscle begins to develop and suddenly you find yourself sinking where once you could float, but Haru never seemed to have that problem. For him, the water was a safer bet than land.

It’s also, if he’s honest, about silence. Haru isn’t a chatterer, never could see the point in over-long conversations, so the numbing, backwards-echo sensation of being underwater has always suited him perfectly; the false silence found even at a meet, where bodies thrash around you and your own heart beats in your ears. Bu the cheers of the crowd are muted, the breathing of the other swimmers soundless, and if you can keep your eyes focused on the space in front, looking slightly downwards, then you could almost convince yourself that you were the only person in the water, all the time. That’s what Makoto believes Haru likes, the silence and the peace. He even holds his breath in the bath, always has, testing his lung capacity and reveling in the way the sound drains away. Makoto, for all his thinking, doesn’t know what it is that he gets out of swimming – other than being near Haru – but suspects it has more to do with feeling smaller, sleeker, less of an affable wall than he does on land. It’s nice not to be tall, too, just long in the pool, where it is an advantage and not an oddity.

Haru’s stroke is off, when Makoto watches, his high elbow sat flat back, rather than rising above the water, and he’s using the old fashioned hand entry, the curved one no one teaches anymore because kids dislocate their wrists – and besides, it’s fallen out of favour with the Olympic crowd. This is Haru swimming not for precision, or competition, but for the sheer joy of being in the water, of being free, of the glide of his body cutting through the warm water with ease. When he pulls himself out of the water, it’s easy for Makoto to walk to him and pull him upright, to cradle his jaw and kiss him, tasting chlorine and energy drink, feeling the difference between his sun and poolside-warmed skin and Haru’s colder, water-logged lips, before pulling away, his shirt wet where Haru was pressed against him. The deep end sparkles behind them, sunlight coming in from the high windows, and Haru grins at him, wolfishly, before lining up and diving, backwards, back into the cool blue. For a moment, Makoto sees him crystallised in the air, flying water droplets catching the sun, his back arched as his arms stretch over his head, and the curve of his body is like watching a dolphin clear the water, before Haru is gone, resurfacing further down the pool, his stroke once more the careful, precise domain of the professional swimmer.

But every Saturday morning, Makoto never forgets that Haru lets him see this, that Haru allows him to see his stroke sloppy, his kick slow, just reveling in the water and not worrying about times, or competition. That Haru lets him steal a kiss in this quiet, sunlit domain of glittering blue and green, of water sloshing continually into the deck-level drains. This, more than during a race, more than in their bed is where Haru is truly himself, and every Saturday, Makoto drags himself out of bed at 5am to watch his best friend, his lover, his teammate as he rolls into a tumble turn at just the right point, the tiny explosion of water like a tidal wave of noise in that quiet, sacred space. He watches Haru run drills for another ten, fifteen minutes, before stripping off his clothes and folding them before he puts them in his bag, which goes neatly on the bench, next to Haru’s. Down to nothing but trunks, he fishes out his goggles and drives in, embracing the cool, sweet blue for just a moment, before surfacing into a lazy warm up – after all, coach will set another as soon as he gets here.

Haru flashes past sometimes, like spotting a shoal of fish in the sea, a glint of silver off his goggle the only way to see him coming before he has already swam past and Makoto wonders whether it would be worth the energy to chase him, tap at his toes in the worst swim etiquette until Haru turned around at the lane end. Maybe then there would be another kiss, or a smile, or some other acknowledgement that there was someone else here, besides Haru and the water. Some weekends Makoto chases, some days he leaves it be, but either way, he considers he’s lucky. If he has to share Haru with the water, then at least Haru also shares the pool with him, gives him this freedom of movement, this weightless twist of his body. Before the others arrive, before the coach gets in and starts to set up, before the lifeguards have put the lane ropes in, this is their domain, as much romance and flirtation as it is hard work and concentration. In these moments, stolen alone with Haru and the water, Makoto knows that he’d never be able to choose one over the other. To love Haru is to love water, and in a way, to love water is to love Haru. At the end of the lane, the dark-haired man has stopped, and Makoto leans in, feeling Haru’s heart race as his breath comes shallow, runs a thumb over an over-zealous love bite from the night before, and steals another kiss, slow and soft this time, a promise. 

Soon, the coach and the rest of the team will arrive, the lane ropes will split the pool, and there will be nothing but hard work and the sound of the coach’s whistle. After practice, they’ll head out for protein shakes with some of the rest of the team, and there will be conversation, joking, discussions of upcoming meets, and team camaraderie. But for now, as his lover looks at him with that tiny smile of his, the one few get to see, there is only Haru – Haru and the water.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I know. I'm sad it's not porn, too.


End file.
